The Blog

  • November 8, 2011
  • How Do You Do.com?

    We’re just a day past announcing the CRM Idol winner (GetSatisfaction) and I’m already involved in a beta for a new product, Do.com.  I can already tell you that it won’t make it into next year’s CRM Idol because the sponsoring company, Salesforce.com, won’t make last year’s emerging company revenue cut of $14 million.  Something tells me they’re a hair over that.  LOL!

    Anyhow, the important thing is Do.com — what is it? Salesforce calls it a social productivity app and I can’t think of something better.  I started using it yesterday to plan a small personal project.  Basically “Do” runs sort of like Twitter or Facebook with a metaphor that chunks the screen into discrete elements.  Twitter has discrete tweets, Facebook has posts and Do.com has things that need doing like projects and within them tasks.

    A leader can assign a task to anyone and the cool thing is that the other person does not already have to be enrolled as a friend or associate.  If you know someone’s email address you’re in business.  You can send a task back up the chain of command too like, please check on my expense payment for instance.

    As someone looking to improve my personal productivity I enlisted my wife in a small project to go out on a date.  I asked her to get tickets to a show and discovered that Do is a bit more democratic than I thought.  Do let her tell me that she didn’t have time today and that I might be in a better position to get the tickets.  So much for socialization.

    Had this been a real world situation I am sure I could have negotiated with an employee to get the tickets tomorrow or as soon as possible or something like that.

    At any rate, projects have tasks and larger projects can have sections like get dinner reservations (I know, I’ll do it) could be a separate section if there were multiple tasks like calling the restaurant, getting a baby sitter (my kids are in college, no thanks) or checking to see if our friends want to come.  I suppose checking with friends could just be a task that would go out to them via email and I’d get a reply.

    You can add notes anywhere you want, for example, to a task.  To the “Find a babysitter” task I added the note, “Don’t get that woman who drank my scotch last time.”  See, easy.

    Do.com looks like a nice productivity tool.  It lives on the internet and anyone can use it and I believe that anyone with a mobile device will see that it enables them to stay connected and on top of various hot irons in the fire no matter what.  And because it’s internet resident when you come in from the cold and want to use Do.com on a computer with a real keyboard, everything about the project will be there already — no synchronizing.

    My analysis of the work environment in the years ahead includes more people working away from the buildings and infrastructures built to support them.  Productivity will depend on tools like Do.com.  Perhaps even more to the point, this product enables you to both comingle work and personal life and still keep things separate.

    But I’m not sold yet.  I still need to figure out how my wife already figured out how to use this thing well enough to put everything back in my lap.

    Published: 12 years ago


    Discussion

    • November 8th, 2011 at 10:40 am    

      I’d also say that this is a powerful tool for people engaged in distance learning. For ex, an executive MBA program with people forming groups from all over a geography.

      • November 8th, 2011 at 4:10 pm    

        I just thought of another possible use case facilitated by the combination of DO.com and Chatter ………. university research. That too is very powerful.

    • November 8th, 2011 at 10:24 am    

      Hi Denis,

      As you would imagine I’m going to take the student’s perspective here. Now, how powerful is Do.com. I too am using it as a beta. Once it is integrated into studentforce, woops; meant to say salesforce (perhaps the better way of referring to the integration is … force.com) then faculty can assign projects to an entire class or, to groups within a class. The students can assign tasks and they can all roll up to the specific: Assignment; during the Class; as a part of a student’s Major; while attending a specific school; whose resources (eTextbooks, Course Content, LecturesOnDemand) are also associated.

      How’s that for a student building a profile of their academic accomplishments by “DO” – ing !!

      Ed

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